Graduate school

See also

Research at the Department for Continuing Education

The Department has an active interdisciplinary research community, particularly with respect to public engagement and practitioner-based initiatives which build on the research interests of our academic staff and over 80 research students.

How do asylum seekers' outcomes compare to those of the native population and other immigrants? Dr Isabel Ruiz, Director of Studies in economics, investigates.

Dr Claire I R O'Mahony

Biography

Having joined the Department for Continuing Education in 2006, I set up the MSt in the History of Design Programme for which I am Course Director. I am an Associate of the History Faculty and was a Fellow of Kellogg College (2006-19) serving as Admissions Tutor (2011-3) as well as Director of Graduate Studies for the Department for Continuing Education (2013-16).

Whilst researching my doctorate under the supervision of Professor John House at the Courtauld Institute, Municipality and the Mural: Townhall Decoration in Third Republic France, I began my teaching career at the Courtauld, Birkbeck College, Reading and Thames Valley. My other roles have included of Director of History of Art Lifelong Learning at the University of Bristol (2002-7), Curator for 'Brunel and the Art of Invention' exhibition Bristol City Art Gallery (Brunel 200 project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund) 2006, Education Officer for Community and Secondary School groups at the Courtauld Gallery and Exhibition researcher at the Richard Green Galleries London, founding Assistant Editor of Art on the Line, Research Grant Coordinator on the Executive Committee of the Design History Society (2004-2008), member of the Centre for the Study of Visual and Literary Cultures in France, University of Bristol (2002-7).

Doctoral Supervision

At present I am supervising three doctoral projects in Architectural History looking at turn-of-the century luxury hotels in London (Emma Anderson), newsreel cinema design in interwar Britain (Kay Carson) and nineteenth-century building materials (Lily Crowther with Professor William Whyte) . I welcome proposals from prospective doctoral candidates seeking to research visual and material cultures and design produced in Europe between 1870 and 1968.

Research interests

My research centres on the history of decoration in Europe particularly between 1870 and 1968; Third and Fourth Republic France are my primary focus. The relationships between design writing, materiality and the communication of private and public identity led me to a particular interest in the dialogue between Republican politics; aesthetic writing; decorative objects and interiors. Civic mural painting projects; glass, furniture, jewellery and tapestry; exhibition and theatre scenography have been the core case studies of my research. These sites and objects capture debates about regional identity and leftist politics with particular acuity. Fin-de-siècle decoration also affords insight into the sympathies and tensions between pantheistic organicism and natural science. The ways in which 'decoration' has been formulated as a gendered practice and ideological construct informs my investigations into the moral and pragmatic dilemmas between industrial processes and handicraft.

My next project will explore decoration as a manifestation of regionalist political engagement since 1870. The argument focuses on the local creative industries of three borderland environments: glass produced during the annexation and post-1918 recuperation of Alsace-Lorraine; tapestry woven in Aubusson in the central region of the Creuse which became the border between zones during the 1940-4 Occupation and interior design for the international border spaces of transport design and high office in the 1960s. The methodology of the project is to provide an interdisciplinary cultural history of modern France examining how designed objects and environments embodied the Republic through its regions and the contested geo-political and aesthetic borders they represented.

Select Publications

Forthcoming:

'Introduction' and 'Chapter 7 Exhibitions and Display' in A Cultural History of Furniture (six-volume series) editor of modern period volume (Bloomsbury Press, 2019)

Books, Chapters and Articles:

‘Renaissance and Resistance: Modern French Tapestry and Collective Craft’ Journal of Modern Craft,9.3, (Nov 2016) 265-88

Public Engagement

Academic Convenor and Invited Talks:

'Decoration’s Objects: Building a borderland microcosm amidst the 1925 Exposition' for Building-Object/Design-Architecture: Exploring Interconnections Conference 6 - 8th June Design History Society, the European Architectural History Network, and the Architecture Space and Society Centre (Birkbeck).

‘Furnishing Modern Cultural Histories’ Modern Interiors Research Centre Kinston University 30 January 2019

Bletchley, Cultural History and Creative Industry Symposium 9 June 2017 Kellogg College